TRANS Nr. 17: 5.4 – Madhubanti Bhattacharyya: The Asian-American Female Pioneer

The epigraphs with which I have begun my essay are from Sister of My Heart by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni and Jasmine and Desirable Daughters by Bharati Mukherjee. The authors I am looking at are women whose journeys began from conservative middle-class families in Kolkata (or Calcutta as it then was). Sent abroad to study in the late 60’s and mid 70’s, they never returned “home”. In fact, the place they were only to visit briefly, before returning to marry and settle down, became “home”: a change of perspective caused by migration, which is the main subject of my investigation. Both writers have since become naturalised American citizens. It is therefore from the perspective of having already made the journey that their characters subsequently do, that they look back on the many changes associated with migrating women. The authors themselves were quite literally pioneers in the sense that they were amongst the first women to be “allowed” abroad for higher education. Their characters too are pioneers, but in different ways; something I will discuss in more detail later.

I must first point out however, that the aim of my study is not to map the “realities” of the authors’ lives on to the lives of their characters. The biographical details with which I started out are important merely to flag their position as American citizens who have remained Indian only by ethnic origin, writing about a nostalgically remembered “home” back in India. It has been suggested that this perspective is totally different from that of authors based in India, a difference caused not just by the choices of an individual writer, but also by the distance and intended audience. The very fact that these books are being written, and more importantly, published and read is perhaps an indicator of the times. However, the very process of achieving publication means some kind of pandering to public “taste”: which in the crudest of terms could be called playing along to the perpetuation of stereotypes.(1) And this is where the ethical dilemma of the female writer writing about other women whose fictional trajectories bear a resemblance to actual journeys and struggles comes in. Should she range alongside these women, or distance herself from them: a choice of being representative, or an exception? Admittedly, fiction is not a history, theories of national allegories notwithstanding, but various kinds of journeying. Yet, in Indian fiction, history is a formative presence that cannot be ignored. What this study is attempting to do is, in effect, focus on how a “real” phenomenon, that of Indian women’s migration to America, is represented in fiction. The authorial choices, whether in life or in literature have been made: whilst remaining aware of them, it is outside the scope of this paper to engage with the “moral” ramifications of such choices.

Migration is the embarkation on a long journey with the express purpose of settling in a new place. One of the best-known established patterns in this regard were the west-ward looking American pioneers. Their adventures, breaking away from established homes, in search of unencumbered freedom and a new better way of life have made their way into an entire genre of books, films and other representations. What is not often mentioned in this context is how this choice and freedom can be seen to extend only to white males. The stout-hearted women who made it out there merely followed their men, and found themselves facing the same domestic drudgery they had left behind: the discomfort exacerbated by the physical privations their new surroundings offered. Where men searched for, and found, better conditions, the women often were worse off.

The issue of a woman’s voluntary migration is thus more complicated and has a more immediately obvious impact on gender roles. It problematises the overwhelmingly white and male connotations of the word pioneer but it also forces one to face the unfamiliar and therefore disturbing spectacle of a woman exercising her agency to search for a different life. In the first of the epigraphs with which I began my paper, this is the climax (although not the end) which the novel, Sister of my Heart has been aiming for. Through a complicated story-line straddling several genres and sub-plots, stretching from rural Bengal to California, this is the first time a woman has been able to exercise her own choice in the ordering of her own life. When Sudha, one of the sisters of the title rejects the certainty of returning, it is to the support of place, rather than of people that she turns.

In this new-found desire for independence and self-definition, one realises that space is not “the dead, the fixed, the undialectical, the immobile” (Foucalt 72). A new place can perform the act of severance from established traditions: therefore conferring freedom: something that has first been documented by Victorian women travellers. The ambiguity of the role of explorer was not new to them. As women, their lives were created around that dilemma; they were certainly insiders and participants in their culture, yet they always stood outside the structures of power. Women carried that duality of identity with them, and they found that such duality served them well. At home they were outsiders by virtue of their sex; in their new surroundings, they were outsiders by virtue of their race: “Growing up in homes circumscribed by Victorian standards and expectations, their lives had been molded for them. Their freedom came from living in places removed from that circumscription” (Domosh 32).

This is true in quite the same way for the Asian-American pioneer, since home is still a place loaded with many meanings in all cultures. In India, women have traditionally been the keepers of hearth and home, the epitome of the domesticity for which men went out to earn, went to wage war, and to which they came back after all their strife with the external world. Unchanging and immobile too except as chattels transported along with the male, the issue of women's voluntary, independent journeying (migration leading to the hyphenated identities) is thus a vexed one, bringing up all the issues of violation of space demarcations, role reversals and so on.

Yet, one cannot but question whether a physical migration/journeying brings unquestioned freedom in its wake. A classic case in point is the Asian-American women who people many of these books written by authors who are part of the diaspora or have embraced citizenship of another country. In these narratives women have physically moved thousands of miles away from the suffocating rigidity of cultural norms to an apparently unrestricted space. But there they have discovered themselves cast into the role of interpreter for precisely the place and associations they escaped from, and therefore find themselves trapped in a different kind of non-participation in their chosen space, which to the casual observer can pass for independence. It is perhaps the exchange of one kind of bondage for another, but these are totally different experiences of diametrically opposed spaces, and cannot be clubbed together.

In “real” life, journeys are both physical and mental. What may not be immediately obvious is that this physical journey may have been undertaken without a corresponding mental shift having taken place. That is to say, the coordinates on a physical map have changed, but if one was to cognitively map the mindset, the existence of a nostalgic chronotope may not only have prevented the corresponding movement, but created an actual regression. The term “Asian-American” thus adds an additional layer to my discussion.(2)

As I have said before: journeys are associated with “getting away”, a fresh start and an access to at least a modicum of freedom: no matter how fleeting. The life patterns of an Indian woman who migrated to America as part of a family headed by a male followed pretty much the same trajectory. Except she was now doubly displaced. Distanced both physically and mentally from “home”, buffeted by the changes in everyday realities, home is re-fashioned through yearning into a vision which is a chronotope that perhaps could only ever be mapped cognitively: the “homehomehome” of my second epigraph. As Michel Foucault suggests, such spaces are fundamentally unreal because they are unattainable by the actual wishes and desires of those inhabiting them. They are non-places, utopias or dystopias in a “general relation of direct or inverted analogy with the real space of society” (68).

The time-space compressions which are assumed to be making “community” die out do not empower everyone equally. International long-haul flights and the availability of the same kinds of material goods (emblems of specific cultures) everywhere have both helped easy access, but also worsened pigeonholing into stereotypes. This brings me to my third epigraph, which ends on a note of Indian antithesis to “the horror!” of Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness. Like the hoped for and finally soul-destroying unreality of the centre of meaning, the apocalyptic vision isn’t “real” except as a mindset, which clashes with opposite constructions of the same space, where the Inside and Outside have been turned inside out. From different gendered visualisations the same physical space comprises contradictory places. A comfortingly compact known way of life may be a stultifying claustrophobic death-trap depending on where one is on the power-scale, as well as what gender one belongs to. In this context, sex is gender, socially constructed or otherwise. The nostalgic memory of a close-knit mining town may, as Doreen Massey points out bring back memories best forgotten of horrendous back-breaking domestic labour for a miner’s wife: the “friendly local” as a site of relaxation a specifically male space that threatened (female) interlopers. The compression I mentioned earlier has deepened the polarisation. As the eponymous heroine of Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine realises, “Bud courts me because I am alien. I am darkness, mystery, inscrutability. The East plugs me into instant vitality and wisdom. I rejuvenate him simply by being who I am” (Mukherjee 1989: 178). It is easier than ever before to “import” a “typical” Indian woman.

Who or what is that perceived construction? The modern Indian woman is a multifarious figure in the public (usually male) imagination. On the one hand, she physically occupies multiple places: traditionally, the home, the kitchen, inner apartments and gradually, with a vaguely subversive feel, the office space, political/public arenas. On the other hand she fills varied spaces in the imagination: she is analogous to the Nation and its integrity, the symbol of the purity of “essential” Indian culture, the Mother Goddess, symbol of life and worshipped for her fertility, the link connecting past present and future in one unbroken chain. She is “Ardhangini”: both spiritual and secular helpmeet and companion, the “Grihalakshmi” who is the symbol of good luck and bringer of prosperity in the house, the quintessential uncomplaining ever-giving nurse, mother, and wife. Conversely, she is also a burden, a symbol of ill-luck and responsibility, unequal and subordinate. But these spaces and these roles are all part of an external gaze, that of the patriarchal hegemony, which ironically draws its greatest strength and legitimacy from the support given to it by other women. They are also the determinants of gender relationships: which write the Indian woman into submission and silence: into the ever-giving and ever self-effacing. That one should wish to perpetuate these stereotypes even having apparently moved on is an example of a travelling without journeying: the former a physical movement from place to place, the latter the often-overlooked corresponding shift in mindset.

Under such circumstances, stultifying experiences transform into comforting certainties but ones to which they no longer have access since she is now part of the foreign “Other”. So the “homehomehome” in the second of my epigraphs is especially poignant precisely because it no longer exists. On the other hand, the new physical spaces experienced her as “alien”: an outsider who “looks” out of place. Tara in Desirable Daughters can therefore be clubbed with any other exotic foreigners who stand in bruised contrast to the wholesome “dear concerned-about-other-women’s welfare” American who even has the “big drooling goofy Lab mixes” to complete the picture of uncomplicated joy. The same parameters and the male gaze still bound the women: only, they now have the critical apparatus of thought to realise their limitations and boundaries and chafe against them even as she looks towards the future “greedy with wants and reckless with hope” (Mukherjee 1989: 214). Jasmine is still dependent on a man as in each of her different avatars she has needed and been needed by different men. This is precisely the situation Sudha in Sister of My Heart repudiates, but women who seek real independence are still reminded to be “thankful” for the “liberal” husbands and lifestyles they have access to: as Anju, the other sister in the title of Divakaruni’s novel discovers. They still perform the same subjugated, circumscribed, sometimes essentially decorative roles: but the subjugation is now more subtle. Why is that? For that one must go back to what makes up a woman’s life: something comparable to the themes that “women’s writing” is “allowed” to encompass. “You are supposed to write about certain things: house, children love” (Jones 113). None of these things are possible without a man: homosexual options are unacceptable aberrations. But these declarations of independence on her part alienate her from the men she “ought” to be able to find.

So how has the journeying brought about any changes? Her attempt to subvert gender roles alienates her from her own “roots”, but she is also unable to totally flee the mindsets she set out to defy. She is even more aware of the frameworks constraining her: but she is unable to erect something totally different in its place. Tara in Desirable Daughters realises with a shock that five years after her divorce, she still is Mrs. Bish Banerjee. Yet that is exactly the role of the changed space that cannot be discounted. The place she is in: in this case America, can offer her many choices: whether she is able to choose any of them or find happiness at all is something she needs to decide for herself. For too long sex (as biological identity) and gender (the social construct that determines masculinity and femininity) have been assumed to be the same thing. But women “are not born, they are made” (Berghoffen 1).

These women are pioneers in that they are attempting to live the Indian struggle on non-Indian soil. And yet, that too is an over-simplification: in the same mould as the theorisations which have for so long subsumed an individual woman’s struggle into that on behalf of or against society on the whole. The four epigraphs I started with are snapshots of various stages in the uphill process of striking out through a change of place: the setting out, the homesickness, the partial acclimatisation and the further assimilation into America. Yet the process is far from complete. Some of the women reject their heritage, wanting to meld into their new surroundings. Others re-mould it for maximum audience benefit. And finally there are those who, realising that the Asian-American woman is a new, “hybrid” construct attempt to capture it through their lives and decisions, whilst remaining in search of happiness. What that might mean is perhaps best left open in Jasmine’s words: “I realised […] that America had thrown me again. […] She wasn’t happy? She looked happy, sounded happy, acted happy. Then what did happy mean?” (Mukherjee 1989: 161).

1 The Indian woman is always adept in the kitchen, silent, mysterious and exotic, for whom stringing together a sentence in English is a major achievement. Any deviations bring attendant problems, an issue I will come back to later

2 It is necessary for me to point out in this context that whilst I am using the term “Asian” I am concentrating only on women of Indian origin. The experiences and their literary representations, of other women from “Asia”, whilst similar in some essential respects, are too variegated to be within the scope of this paper. On the other hand, the term Indian, in conjunction with American, leads to an erroneous impression about a totally different cultural/ethnic group of people.

For quotation purposes:
Madhubanti Bhattacharyya: The Asian-American Female Pioneer: Journeying towards Changing Gender Roles - . In: TRANS. Internet-Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften. No. 17/2008. WWW: http://www.inst.at/trans/17Nr/5-4/5-4_bhattacharyya.htm

	Internet-Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften	17. Nr.	August 2008

Sektion 5.4.	Women’s Performances in Transnational Migration Sektionsleiterin \| Section Chair: Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru (University of Bucharest, Romania) Dokumentation \| Documentation \| Documentation